Soft-Output from Covered Space Decoding of Product Codes

In this work, we propose a new soft-input soft-output decoder called soft-output from covered space (SOCS) decoder. It estimates the a posteriori reliability based on the space explored by a list decoder, i.e., the set of vectors for which the list decoder knows whether they are codewords. This approach enables a more accurate calculation of the a posteriori reliability and results in gains of up to 0.25$$dB for turbo product decoding with SOCS compared to Chase-Pyndiah decoding.